At Hobsonville Point, we love doing projects that benefit and encourage decisions and deeper thinking in our community. Project based learning is such a neat thing to do and should happen in every school! Students and teachers being able to combine their thoughts, opinions into projects that do good for ourselves, the school area and the wider community. In 2015, our focus for ‘Big Projects’ was Sustainability as that was our focus for the second half of the year. (The first half of the year focusing on enterprise and building school and community culture).

The previous year we got given the name of a show “Future 2025” and students had 15 weeks to create a school show sending out messages about what youth wanted to see Auckland, New Zealand look like by the year 2025. Of course there was the funny side of the show and we made sure we had some funny moments in it. For example, according to one of the ‘news presenters’ announced the iPhone 20 had just come into stores and that Pippa Middleton was now on to her 10th baby with Prince William.

On a more serious note, being able to have such a neat experience doing these Sustainable Shows, it means we as youth are able to share and communicate our ideas, passions and interests into Sustainability in a really cool way. For example, one of the scenes in Future 2025 we had transformed ordinary fairy tales and added a touch of sustainability to it. Ariel was swimming in the ocean surrounded by dirty rubbish which highlighted the and a single maui dolphin (actually played by myself) swimming next to her too. The dolphin was marked, #55 which was a symbol for there only being 55 native maui dolphins left in the world. This particular dolphin was the last of his kind and the end of the scene wasn’t great for the dolphin either.

School shows are great. But sustainable school shows offers so much more learning and thinking for the audience to take away after the conclusion of it all. The message that we give at HPSS to the audience is, what impact are you making to the future of this planet? And, how are we going to change this world and create a healthier planet for all of us?